Large numbers of people go into Internet Marketing as a side business because they are dissatisfied with some aspect of their career. Maybe they would like to make more money, maybe they would like to own their own business, or maybe they want the freedom intrinsic to working on the Internet.

But as it turns out, their online business does considerably worse than the job they’ve come to hate. In fact, in most circumstances, it’s an utter failure.

Why is that?

It’s because although a lot of people think they have an online business, they actually have a hobby. But here’s the deal:

Internet Marketing is NOT a Hobby!

Let’s look at a few of the differences between a professional and a hobbyist. Then you can decide which one you want to be.

A Pro is a Fisherman; A Hobbyist is a Fish
Are you spending more time learning, surfing, and buying instructional products than actually “doing” Internet Marketing? You know, acting like a fish. What you need to do is act like a fisherman — actually casting your lines, trying different bait, and reeling in some fish of your own.

A Pro Works Working Hours in a Work Environment
If you own a business, keep business hours. Not necessarily “9 to 5″ hours, but they keep regular hours at a place of business. Your couch in front of the television is not a “place of business,” so find one. A spare bedroom, your dining room table, a coffee shop, whatever. But set up a time and environment and keep to it.

A Pro Has a Business Plan; A Hobbyist Has an Idea
Business plans have business models, revenue plans and projections, and defined sets of expectations and responsibilities. Hobbyists just hear of a “business opportunity,” tactic, or “money-getting idea.” Be the pro –  have a plan, and work the plan.

A Pro Doesn’t Get Distracted; Hobbyists Do Several “Projects”
Professional business owners don’t open a restaurant, a store, and a dry cleaners all in the same month. They choose a business, and build it. After they’re successful in that endeavor, they may expand their business portfolio, but not until they’ve achieved a certain level of success in their current business.

A Pro Doesn’t Take Business Personally
Although owning a business is one of the fastest ways to force you to confront the “mental stuff” that’s flying around in your head (opinions on money, selling, promotion, and more), the business professional realizes that any result is an asset, even if it’s a “failure.” The hobbyist decides that he isn’t “any good at this stuff” and continues the downward spiral.

So take the decision and make your stand. What are you: an Internet Marketing professional or hobbyist?

Remember the kid from “The Sixth Sense?” He saw dead people. Not a good gift to have, but he was able to learn how to turn it to his advantage so he could help people who needed it.

If you want to succeed in marketing, you need to start seeing marketing. This is pretty easy since it’s all around us. You just need to start paying attention.

Be seeing marketing — and I mean really seeing it — over time, you’ll amass a powerful arsenal of tools to grow your business.

If you feel you really don’t know what to look for, try reading Robert Cialdini’s excellent Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. That will give you more than enough material to work with.

Don’t pay attention to what people or companies say or do from the perspective of a consumer. Watch how they do it. Look for patterns and tactics.

Some questions to ask yourself:

1.) Have I seen this technique before?

2.) What is the desired call to action (what they want you to do)?

3.) How does the market react to this marketing?

4.) How does this particular element integrate into this company’s other marketing?

5.) If appropriate, how can I implement this tactic into my marketing?

6.) How can I test this technique to improve upon it?

See anything interesting out there? Tell me about it! What did you learn?

As a marketer, I’m looking for a few things in a content management system (CMS). Will someone with skills and brains please build this???

Any Page, Any Element Taguchi Testing
I want to be able to split test things like headlines, colors, etc. And it should be from right within the content management system. I don’t want it to be an added-on feature that makes me add lines of code here, there, and everywhere.

Assignable Backend Roles
I want certain people to be able to log in to the back end of my CMS, but not necessarily have full privileges. For example, writers should be able to create content, but not publish it without my approval. That kind of thing.

Built-In Analytics
Yes, I know that analytics packages and content management systems are often thought of as separate packages, but my opinion is that if you aren’t testing and tracking your content, you aren’t managing your content, you’re just publishing it.

Built-In Media Support and Library
Not only do I want the CMS to maintain a library for me to pull from, but I want built in multi-box support for images and movies. If I upload an audio file, I want it to give me a built-in SWF player for streaming audio.

Customizable RSS Feeds
Whether it’s a certain type of page, a certain class of pages, all pages, or whatever, I want control of what goes into an RSS feed, and the ability to create my own feeds as I desire.

Flexible Member Permissions
I want to be able to assign roles to people who sign up with the website, and allow certain roles certain privileges. I’d also like to offer “staged content,” where their access changes on a set schedule. For example, getting “Week One” content the first seven days, and then getting access to “Week Two,” etc.

Intelligent and Customizable Search Engine Friendly URL’s
It amazes me that so many content management systems don’t provide even this basic feature. I don’t want to see URL’s with question marks, ampersands, and long numbers to identify pages. Give me something understandable, with real keywords in the URL.

Paste from Microsoft Word (or Pages)
Let me write my copy in Microsoft Word (or the excellent Mac OS X Pages), if that’s what I choose to do, and then handle all the formatting when I import it into the WYSIWYG editor.

Per-Page Robots Meta Index/Follow Settings
Especially in the case of campaign landing pages, I don’t especially want everyone and their mother dropping by from their favorite search engines. So give me an option for each page to give robots special instructions. OR, write it to a common robots.txt file.

Per-Page Title Tag Customization (and Meta Description, too)
Do I even need to explain this?

Real-Time PDF Creation for Printing
If someone wants to create a clean hard copy for printing, I want the CMS to provide one.

Scheduled Go-Live Dates/Times
Another self-explanatory item. It doesn’t appear until I say it does.

Site Map — HTML and XML Versions
Just one less thing I’ll have to worry about.

User-Selectable Template Styles
There are several different sub-page types, and I’d like the ability to select preset layouts and styles based on my objectives for the page.

There are two ways to make money on the Internet: sell your own products and services, and sell other people’s products and services. As John Reese says, the smart people do both.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will consider “your” products as an order that you fill, even if they aren’t actually “your” products. If someone else is filling the order, we will consider it a sale of “other people’s” stuff.

But within these two high-level concepts are several business models you may wish to employ. Here are some of those models:

Selling Your Own Products

Selling Physical Goods
It sure seems to work for Zappos, Amazon, and others. And it can work for you, too. Consider opening an online store. If you need help finding a wholesale source for the products you would like to sell, check out Worldwide Brands.

Selling Digital Goods
You may wish to sell information products, where the buyer receives digital copies of your product (think iTunes). No shipping and handling, no inventory, warehousing… not a bad idea.

Memberships
Many kinds of websites lend themselves well to a membership model, where subscribers pay a monthly fee for access to the content of your site. You may run a community, have special content, or provide a service for your members. This is sometimes called “continuity.” Some marketers would argue that if you don’t have some kind of continuity program in your business, you don’t really have a business.

Advertising
If you have a lot of great content that attracts lots of visitors, you may want to sell advertising on your site. Advertisers may want to buy per thousand “impressions” of their banner ad. Alternatively, you may wish to charge “per click,” as in when your visitors click on an ad. This is the way you can make money through the Google Adsense program.

Selling Other People’s Products

Affiliate Marketing
This may be the ultimate “lazy man’s” way of making money on the Internet. You will promote other people’s products. When leads that you have generated make a purchase, you will be paid a percentage of the sale.

Drop Shipping
If you would like to sell physical goods, but don’t want to deal with the warehousing, fulfillment, and shipping hassles, you may want to consider working with a source that will drop ship for you. This is when you forward them the order information, and they ship the order directly to your customer.

Extra Credit
One bonus question; not that this is a quiz: What can you do to combine business models for an end-to-end business? For example, creating your own product, selling it, attaching a continuity  program to the backend of the sale (maybe with a free trial?), and then making appropriate affiliate offers to that list.

Think about it. Just remember, you’ve got to walk before you can run. Don’t try to take on the whole world at once. Get raving fans doing just one thing well, then add on an element and grow your business step by step.

Every business has barriers to entry. Internet Marketing is not much different, although the costs are significantly lower than traditional or brick-and-mortar businesses.

Internet Marketing is a resources game. If you are just starting out, your resources are time, money, and knowledge. If you have more time and knowledge, you ultimately may not need to spend as much money. If you have more money than time, you may be able to spend more and have to learn and work less.

As you progress, other currencies are added to the game, such as your email list, links, affiliates/partners, and reputation (including Social Media followers/friends/connections). But for now, we’ll just talk about the tools you need to get started.

I’ve compiled for you a list of the basics; the stuff everybody needs. None of the links are affiliate links, and I receive no consideration or compensation for recommending them. Not all of these might be necessary, depending on your business model.

Hosting
You’ll need a place to put your site to serve it to the Internet. I use and recommend Dreamhost, and have heard good things about Hostgator. You’ll need to pay in advance, and the longer term you buy, the cheaper the price. Plan on spending $215 immediately for 2 years of hosting.

Email
No, not the email you receive, but the email you send to the list of people who want you to talk to them. You need a service provider to like Aweber to handle sending out emails to your list, manage unsubscribes (they happen) and CAN-SPAM compliance. You’ll start out paying $19 a month, and pay more as your list grows beyond 500 people.

Keyword Research
Although there are a few free keyword tools out there, such as the Google Keyword Tool, you might want to supplement those keyword lists with some results from a paid service. Although you could pay Wordtracker for $329 a year, I recommend Keywordtopia for $19.50 a month. You’ll need to spend a couple of bucks extra for the premium keyword services (including Wordtracker results), but it’s worth it.

Analytics
Always, always, always have tracking on everything you do. Everything. Check out what you can do with Crazyegg. For starting out at just $9 a month, it’s worth it.

Shopping Cart/Checkout Software
Depending on your business model, you may need a shopping cart system. You can start out with 1ShoppingCart, which will run you $34/month or $349 per year, if paid in advance. If you plan on selling digital products (e-books, MP3 courses, etc.), use E-Junkie. You can start out there for just $5 a month.

Total Costs
Assuming a moderate amount of list and web traffic growth, plan on spending around $1000 your first year. This price includes the first and second year of hosting.

And now, the good news…
Some tools that you’ll need to make the wheel turn are free. Here are a few…

Analytics
Yes, I know I mentioned this category earlier, but go ahead and grab a Google Analytics account and remember to track and test!

Keyword Research
Make sure to check out the Google Keyword Tool. Use it to generate a keyword list relevant to your market. This probably isn’t the only keyword tool you will want to use, but it’s a good, free, start.

CMS
Content Management System. This will save you from having to learn a lot of HTML and other programming languages to make your web pages do what you want (you’ll still need some knowledge, though).

Your choice of CMS will depend a lot on your business model and what you want the site to do. Two free tools to consider are Wordpress and Joomla. Incidentally, if you go with Joomla, consider joining Rockettheme (starting at $50) for some of the best design templates around.

I’ve put off posting this entry a couple of days because I’m afraid of upsetting people.

It’s not that “Field of Dreams” is a bad movie, it’s just that it’s poisonous to Internet marketers.

Here’s what I don’t like about it: you remember when Kevin Costner’s character is walking around outside and he keeps hearing a voice, saying:

If you build it, they will come.

It might have been a great plot device in the film, but it’s a terrible idea when it comes to online marketing.  Seriously, it’s total crap.

People — especially those new to or unfamiliar to Internet Marketing — build a website and the sit back and wait for the traffic to come rolling in.

And it doesn’t.  Crickets (well, virtual ones, anyway) are chirping.

Even when people know better, they sometimes burn all the available time, money, and energy building that site, and then there’s nothing left to put into marketing and promotion.

The fact is, if you build it, they won’t come.

Why not?  Couple of reasons:

1. They don’t know “it” is even there.
2. They don’t really have a compelling reason to go “there.”

You may remember from an earlier entry that I’m am a proponent of the 90% Solution.  The next time you’re at the beginning of a project, remember to follow it.

(or, How I Learned To Stop Blogging And Love Twitter)

What is it about Twitter that people like so much?  Where is the utility?  Let’s talk this out together…

Seth Godin says we visit social media sites for four reasons:

1.  Who likes me?
2. Is everything okay?
3. How can I become more popular?
4. What’s new?
5. I’m bored, let’s make some noise.

(I agree.)

He further asserts that Twitter delivers all five, instantly.

(I further agree.)

So let’s talk about how we marketers can use these five aspects of Twitter and other forms of social media to support the conversation that is taking place between us and our customers… 

Who likes me?
Let’s face it, Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook are scorecards.  As a marketer, it only makes sense to “follow,” “friend,” or otherwise link to those people who are customers… it could be one step in the journey from “consumer” to “brand advocate.”  So invite people to follow you, and follow them back.  Remember, people won’t care about your brand until you start giving them good reasons to.

Is everything okay?
In my “day job,” our industry has had the unfortunate distinction of  announcing product recalls.  Not a fun time for the company, and especially not for the consumer.  By connecting through social media with your consumers, you can get the bad news (and yes, the good news too!) out faster.  It also allows you to exercise some amount of control of the discussion of those events in those channels.  At least you’ll be able to shape the beginning of the conversation and prevent some of the misinformation that could ensue in your absence.

How can I become more popular?
By connecting to your customers in social media, you’re also beginning to connect them to each other — people who have the same interests.  Not a bad thing. They’re going to see who’s following you and they will find interesting people.

What’s new?
Let’s face it, email is on its way out.  Your future customers (the under 20 crowd) aren’t using it.  So if you want to tell them what’s new, you’d better be talking to them where they’re listening.  That means they want to see about product updates or new products in their Twitterstream.  They want to read about it on your Facebook wall.

I’m bored, let’s make some noise.
It’s not just showing up  in social media, it’s enabling your brand advocates to sing your praises.  So what can you do to equip them to “make some noise?”

Conclusion…
There are two things about social media that I can promise:  

1. It’s not going away.
2. It’s going to look completely different in 3 years.

Having said that, it’s still the place to be.  Go slow, think it through, and be a contributor (not a spammer).

(…and no, I’m not really going to stop blogging!)

In my “day job,” I get a lot of reciprocal linking requests from all sorts of sites.  Some of them are actually about a topic semi-related to our field.  And some aren’t at all.  They almost always say the same thing:

“Hi!  I was browsing your site at [name redacted] and was very impressed!

I linked to it from my page on [something entirely unrelated] at [entirely unrelated site].

If you would like to link back, please use this text…”

And guess what… I never respond to these emails, let alone link back.

Why, you ask?  Could it be snobbery, elitism, even psychosis???  No, and here’s why: 3 reasons I won’t link back to you…

1.  Your website looks like 1998… on a bad day.
Ever see these sites that are so bad, you almost can’t stand to read them?  I’m not just talking about “not top-shelf design.”  I’m talking about horrible design!  Why would I want to do that to people who come to my site?

2.  Google Adsense (or Yahoo… or….) owns your site.
Why would I want to link to a page where 80% of the content is ads?  Hey — nothing wrong with ads.  But if you’re just starting a site, why not try to start off providing good content and then monetize it after you’ve generated heavy and reliable traffic?  And when you do, try to keep your site from looking like advertisers threw up all over it.  Besides, I hear Adsense payouts aren’t what they used to be.  You may need to choose another model.

3.  Your site is unrelated to mine.
I’m still not going to link to a well-designed site with an appropriate amount of ads (a very small percentage of link requests) if the subject of the site has nothing to do with my industry.  No point to it.  ‘Nuff said about that.

The three reasons above should be pretty much universal for any website owner considering if they should honor a link exchange request.  But let me give you a one more that is specific (but not unique) to my situation…

4.  Our site doesn’t advertise complementary products/services.
The purpose of my corporate site is to sell what my company makes.  That’s it.  Why would we distract our potential consumer from that theme with an advertisement about something else?  Thus the reason for no outbound sites to other businesses.

Although the last reason is not universal to all sites, it does raise the excellent point: you probably shouldn’t bother asking a site for a reciprocal link if they don’t have any links on their site.

“So how should I get links?”

Excellent question!  Try creating great content that actually informs and entertains the reader.  Content that eases their pains and frustrations in your area of expertise.  Then link to a few other top sites in your category — just because it could help your readers, not because you’re getting free traffic in return.

If you have a blog, refer to other blogs in your point and expand on the discussions in their posts or comments.  Make sure you’re linking to them when you do it.  Get involved in the conversation, and actually have something worthwhile or interesting to say.

If you do the above on a well-designed site, you’ll be on your way.  Good luck!

This post provides one view of the future of information marketing.  It does not portend to predict the future, or give advice regarding Google’s future plans.  Simply an opinion — and probably wrong, at that.

Remember when Microsoft was the fabled “800 lb. gorilla” of the New Age?  Wasn’t that long ago, really.

The story goes like this: a couple of people had a great idea for a product.  They then started a company to produce said product.  Depending on the people involved in the story, they either almost made it to the big time or started doing really well.

Then Microsoft came along.  Either one of the brains inside Microsoft had that same great idea, or Microsoft (according to some stories) simply took (okay, “stole” may be a better word if the story is true) the idea and did it themselves.  The original couple of people — the “little guys,” if you will — were ruined.  They couldn’t compete with Microsoft.  It was a classic “David versus Goliath” story, except Goliath always won.

Although Microsoft doesn’t seem that big and scary anymore, there is and always will be an 800 lb. gorilla.  Currently, his name is Google.  Nicholas Carr over at Rough Type has a great analysis of Google.  Simply put, Mr. Carr points out (correctly) that more than 99% of Google’s earnings have come from ad revenue.  That’s Google’s core business.  But their complementary business is everything that those ads can be attached to — Internet services and information.  The more widely distributed those little side projects become, the wider the distribution for Google’s ads.

Now I told you all that to tell you this: Google has a vested interest in bringing the cost of Internet information and services down to nothing, or at least close to it.  That should pretty much be obvious by now.

But what if you sell information or services on the Internet?  How will this affect you?

If you have an information product about how to grow tomatoes (an oldie but goodie example), you and I can both be sure that Google won’t be entering the “tomato advice” market anytime soon.  

But here’s the thing: what they will do is produce free and easy-to-use tools so that others can publish their own tomato growth advice, start tomato growth enthusiast social networks, and so on.  The value of your information may be substantially cheapened.

So what is an Internet Marketing boy (or girl) to do?

1. If you’re purely digital, now is the time to branch out.  You’ve got to have something solid (physical) as a part of your product lineup.  Perhaps a printed newsletter, a DVD, or workbook.
2. If you’re selling information, it’s time to produce “value-added” information.  What can you tack on to your main product to make it more attractive?  A “do it for you” service?  Maybe special software?
3. Remember that the worst product ever backed by great marketing will always outsell the best product ever with bad marketing.  If you’re not a great marketer, you’re going to be in trouble for any number of reasons.  Your primary mission is to be way better at marketing than the subject matter experts.

Finally, think of how Google complements their core business with side projects.  Even the losers are partially funded by advertising and user behavioral data.  What can you do to complement your core business at low cost?

This post outlines a simple division of your time when launching a new website.  This solution is to counteract the common problem of burnout in the construction and launch of new websites.

Simply put, the problem is that most entrepreneurs get a great idea for a website, build it, launch it, and then are too burned out to close the loop.  The missing element is, of course, the continued marketing of the site.  So all the work on the site has been for naught.

Even more simply put, the solution is the same that is provided to authors by career coach Dan Miller: the completion of your book is only ten percent of the effort required to be a successful author.  The remaining ninety is spent actually selling books to the public.  You know, marketing!

For authors, the predicament is worse than for Internet marketers.  They can’t hire out the work as easily.  But there are plenty of web design and development resources to help us get the job done.

So the 10% Solution is to know yourself; to know what your 100% is, and make sure that only 10% of your energy is spent building your cool new website.  To make up the gap, don’t be afraid to use freelancers.  Search elance, rentacoder, and other sites to find the talent you need to save that other 90% for marketing.